I have a WD Passport Portable Hard Drive 250 GB and fell on the floor.
The computer doesn't read the hard drive when I connected to it.
I need to recover the data but it is to expensive to do it, and I can not affort it.
If I buy a new WD Passport Portable Hard Drive with the same characteristics, will be possible for me to open the old one and replace tha broken parts? When I put the drive close to my ear I hear a sound that clicks when the disck moves.
Please someone give me a feed back.
Thankyou.
You might want to remove the drive from the enclosure and see if you can slave it somewhere else for it to read. Maybe the enclosure electronics got damage but the drive is still good. Spare enclosure cost less than $20.00.
Was the drive reading/writing when you dropped it? If the drive heads survive the impact, it might have corrupted files but those can usually be recovered if you can get the drive to show up on your computer. A scandisk with the box to fix errors will usually fix it.
I don't know if western digital warranty will cover damage cause by being dropped. But if it does and you send it in, they won't recover the data that is there policy "due to privacy concerns they just format all returned drives" and send a replacement.
If you can get the drive to be recognize again the program to use to recover the data is Testdisk it has the photorec addon that can recover most file types.
If the hard drive itself is damage internally, there are no user replaceable parts inside. Even drives that are identical have different electronics on the circuit card.
If it's "clicking" then I think it's all over for that drive. I was told once by a data recovery firm that you should under no circumstances run a drive when it's clicking, as that may destroy the platter (that holds the data) even if the original damage was only to the head movement mechanism. I was quoted over $600 to recover the data from that drive, which I didn't do. One reason why I always have at least two separate backups kept separate.
